Epstein’s ‘simple’ Draft strategy continues to pay off

Avert your eyes, Alex Jackson. Nobody is saying you won’t still develop into a Major League player. The trade that sent you from the Mariners to the Braves could jump-start your career.

But it’s not too soon to see what the top of the 2014 Draft — when Seattle made the conventional choice with the sixth overall pick and selected Jackson, a widely praised high school catcher with the ability to hit — says about how the game is changing. It also reveals a little bit about how Theo Epstein put together his World Series champions.

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Heading toward the Draft that spring, there was a lot of talk about Jackson and very little about Indiana University catcher-first baseman Kyle Schwarber. But the Cubs fell in love with Schwarber and bypassed Jackson, among others, to take him with the fourth overall pick.

This followed the same dynamic as the Cubs’ decision to select a college third baseman (Kris Bryant) over a college pitcher (Oklahoma’s Jon Gray) and two highly touted high school outfielders (Clint Frazier and Austin Meadows) in the 2013 Draft.

On one swing through the Southeast in early March, Cubs cross-checker Sam Hughes watched Frazier and Meadows with their high school teams in Georgia and then hit a weekend tournament at North Carolina-Wilmington, where Bryant was playing for the University of San Diego Toreros. He became one of the early advocates of the Cubs using the second overall pick on Bryant.

That decision looked obvious this season, when Bryant won the National League MVP Award, but it was anything but at the time.

“I saw those kids on back-to-back days,” Hughes told me in 2015. “That’s where it started getting clear to me. I’m supposed to like these two high school hitters better than Kris, and I don’t — by a long shot.”

Bryant’s immediate success as a pro made it easier for the Cubs to select another pure hitter from the college ranks — Schwarber — over Jackson the following June. But even though Epstein used his first pick for the Cubs on high school outfielder …

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